Bringing Down the Duke: 1 (League of Extraordinary Women)

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Bring Down the Duke is a story of love, independence, and soul mates. It’s one of those romances that makes your heartache as you follow along holding your breath hoping the characters get their happy ending. Evie Dunmore’s debut novel is nothing short of a perfect love story. PDF / EPUB File Name: Bringing_Down_the_Duke_-_Evie_Dunmore.pdf, Bringing_Down_the_Duke_-_Evie_Dunmore.epub It is becoming clear to be me why a fair girl like you has been left on the shelf. You are not only bookish but a radical political activist. All highly impractical in a wife." So, where do my issues lie? Well, let me first say that I am not generally a reader of romance. I can count on one hand the number of romance novels I've read, and this is actually my very first historical romance novel. I know very little about the tropes of the genre, but I can guess that nothing in this book would be considered terribly egregious to the average romance reader (please correct me if I'm wrong), but personally, I struggled. How so? Let me count the ways: When I started at BOTM, I was a professed literary snob—and probably flaunted that term with pride (cue eye roll). I never read romance books because I assumed they were too cheesy and poorly written to be considered worthy of my time. Years later, dozens of romance books devoured, I’m so happy to report that, on that score, I was wrong.

Bringing Down the Duke – Evie Dunmore

I mean, it's got a strong feminist vibe, good message about finding yourself, and main characters that aren't horrid. It just didn't grab me and pull me in like I wanted it to. I’m not saying it wasn’t a good novel. I just wasn’t wowed by it. Nevertheless, the writing was great. The story flowed and it easily engaged, I just didn’t love it.

Evie Dunmore shows us how far women have come, how women fought for what we consider normal and rightfully ours. This alone makes it this book worth reading and will give you a new appreciation of the women's role in society today. A steamy, intelligent and feel good historical romance, set in Victorian England at the time of the Suffragette movement! Woven throughout Sebastian and Annabelle’s story is the struggle to pass an amendment to the Married Women’s Property Act in 1882. The fight for women to be able to retain some money and property under their own name is a very prevalent subplot throughout the book. As a history lover, I enjoyed learning more about this aspect of British women’s history. In fact, Bringing Down the Duke seems to use its thin veneer of wokeness as an excuse to revel in gender essentialism. Pretty much every encounter between the two leads mentioned "feminine warmth" and "masculine hardness", so I had strained my eyes from rolling them so hard before I was very far into the book. Brilliant but destitute Annabelle Archer is one of the first female students at Oxford University. In return for her scholarship, she must recruit influential men to champion the rising women’s suffrage movement. Her first target is Sebastian Devereux: cold, calculating and the most powerful duke in England.

Bringing Down the Duke (A League of [PDF] [EPUB] Bringing Down the Duke (A League of

I think could have probably gone with the I-love-you-because-true-love stuff if the book hadn't been so realistic-ish in other areas. Maybe if it were a bit more silly like other historical romances tend to be, you know?In between all of his nonsense, there's also a great amount of ugly gender essentialist language in here about the heroine's Feminine Softness and the hero's Masculine Hardness. This is one of those books that refers to women as "females". Again, this is 2019, I shouldn't have to say that this sort of language completely erases trans and non-binary/genderqueer people from existence, and even cis people who don't have the right kinds of bodies (curvy cis men and lean cis women exist, amazingly). And what does shit like "feminine warmth" mean? Do women somehow radiate a special, mystical body heat that fundamentally differs from men? Do their atoms vibrate at some frequency labeled F E M A L E? I'm so tired, authors, don't do this to me. I have read the future of historical romance, and it’s Evie Dunmore’ Eva Leigh, author of Dare to Love a Duke The beginning of the book started out great. Sure the book has lots of clichés, tropes, and silliness but rather than being annoyed, I kinda felt like I was meeting an old beloved friend. I was entertained because I felt like the novel was pulling from books by Austen, the Brontë sisters, etc. and I liked the homages. I loved the set-up. I was heartily entertained by how the two love interests meet and was looking forward to see how they would interact. While I was interested in the Duke's brother and in Annabelle's friends, I really wasn't all that fascinated by either Annabelle or Sebastian.